For Extra Flavorful Banana Bread, You Need More Of The Main Ingredient

Banana bread is the crowd-pleasing choice when it comes to repurposing overripe bananas. Bananas may be the foundation of a simple dump-it banana bread recipe, but their fruity flavor is often obscured by sweeteners, flour, and additional mix-ins. The best way to make your banana bread live up to its name is by adding more bananas.

If your recipe calls for three ripe bananas, like this brown butter banana bread recipe, try adding an extra two bananas for a major flavor upgrade. The trick to adding more bananas without adjusting the proportions of the other ingredients in your favorite banana bread recipe is to make a banana reduction. It may sound fancy, but all a banana reduction entails is mashing bananas up in a saucepan to release their juices, then simmering them to reduce their volume.

Reducing the bananas for a few minutes will intensify their flavor while also caramelizing their sugars for even more depth. Plus, it'll compress their flesh into a thick, syrupy mash to which you'll add your wet and dry ingredients. You don't even have to dirty a mixing bowl, opting instead to add all of your ingredients to the pot you've used to reduce your bananas before pouring the batter into a loaf pan and baking it. Extra bananas will also improve the consistency of your banana bread's crumb with extra moisture to keep your loaf from drying out in the oven.

A banana reduction will make for flavorful and moist banana bread with minimal effort, but there are a few extra tips to ensure the best outcome. While the reduction will caramelize the sugars in your banana, you can further enhance that depth of sweetness by using brown sugar instead of white sugar. Brown sugar's pasty consistency will also provide even more moisture for your banana bread.

While you can add the rest of your banana bread ingredients to your reduced bananas in the pot, be sure to take the pot off of the heat. Start by adding the fat, whether it's butter or oil, and passively let the fat dissolve into the warm reduction before whisking in eggs and sugar. For the dry ingredients, the less mixing, the better. Consequently, try folding the flour, baking soda, and salt in as gently as possible. Overmixing will transform the dense yet spongey pound-cake-like texture of a banana bread loaf into an unpleasantly gummy, heavy crumb.

Frozen bananas will also work in a banana reduction and will further safeguard the crumb from drying out. So even if you don't want to make banana bread immediately, you can still get those overripe bananas off your counter before they smell up your kitchen or attract fruit flies. A surplus of frozen bananas will provide a tasty bounty for banana bread and, perhaps, a vegan banana and chocolate ice cream to pair with it.